Abstract

Children engage in sociodramatic pretend play to develop strategies for dealing with the dangers and uncertainties of their everyday live. This paper examines the path into joint pretend play by a child therapist and her young patient through fine-grained conversation analysis and the usage of the PRAAT-Software. Interactants don’t follow a linear path from the real world into play but are rather negotiating their ideas of how the play might/should unfold. In a second part, this paper deals with the patients’ aggressive behavior as a result of pretended mother-child interactions enacted by the therapist. A special light is shed on how recurrent interactional constellations in the pretend play lead to a development of structures of expectations.